We often here that mono cropping leaves one open to rapidly spreading global viruses. The poster child for this is the windows operating sytem and its suceptibility to rpc and outlook and active-X infections.
The yarn goes that MS products are not so badly written, that IS II is no worse that apache, that outlook is no worse than XXXX, its just that windows runs on 95% of the worlds computers so its a target and when its infected it gets noticed.
this apache story sort of gives a lie to this. if it runs 80% of the web servers it is the largest target by definition. Of course it does get attacked but you dont hear about this being a viral thing, spreading throught the mono crop.
I guess one can counter this argument by saying that bussinesses that run web servers maintain their patches better thsn the devil spawned endusers. But this doesn't really wash. If bussinesses had to patch as often as Windows users did they would be screaming bloody murder since while it only costs the end user free time, it cost the bussinesses actual operating expesnes.
There are substances that can allow gas in but keep water out. That's basically what gills are,
were talking about passive systems here, not gills which actively transport disolved gasses but keep LIQUID phase water out (not gas phase water).
the system under discussion is a two-molecule layer. h20 and o2 and c02 gas molecules are all about the same size. The h20 molecules are present in concentration thousands of times hire than the air. it would take an ubnelievable amount of discrimination to keep water in but let air through.
The HAV act (help amerca vote), created a land rush by mandating a minumum number of touchscreen voting machines by 2004. The stalking horse provision in the bill is that blind people cant use most voting systems without assistance, and people in wheel chairs have difficulties as well. Noble motivation yes, but the cure is worse than the problem.
This land rush was led by diebold with a first-to-market system. they acheived this by using off the shelf components and OS and DB. THe system has not proven reliable or safe. I wont regurgitaete the accusationsof fraud, except to mention that any time elections differ by 6 sigma from poll results someting reeks. Unfortunatley other companies ESS and Sequoia tried to keep pace. the ESS systems at least have the benefit of actually failing to boot so often that florida has abandoned them! THe Sequoia system is the best of the lot but still has its own flaw. At least the sequoia people, when pushed, seem to be trying to respond to the demand for voter verified balloting.
The good news is that After pressure by california's santa clara county (19 million dollar contract), Sequoia voting system has agrees to implement (at no cost) a voter verified, recountable, paper ballot in addition to the touch screen systems.
(see here )
Already the House of representatives has a bill pending ( The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003) that will require all touch screen voting systems to be voter verifiable. (see here )
Indeed the entire country of brazil, which has 400,000 electronic voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable systems. (see here )
A 95 page caltech and MIT study surveying many years of voting reports that among all voting methods, the method with the single largest average error rate is electronic voting, which is senate and gubenatorial elections has almost TWICE the error rate of optical scan voting. This means that by enfranchising blind people we disenfranchise far more people. a bad trade. (see here page 21 )
Indeed reality is much worse since that's just an average, since electronic voting errors tend to be both non-random and clustered in catastrophic events.
For example, Bernalio county in Albuquerque reported 48,000 voters went to the polls but only 36,000 votes were registered on Sequoia voting systems. (see here )
Similarly, many votes were lost in the latest election in florida counties using Sequoia voting systems. Janet reno is investigating cases where heavily democratic counties registered ZERO votes for any democrat. Sequoia systems has presented Los Alamos FALSE information of Seqouia systems. For example, they claimed it did not run on windows OS. In fact WinEDS their database collection system is based upon microsoft OS, and uses a Microsoft-based SQL DB, and the password for this system is "password" (really!). (see here )
You can in fact obtain this very minute on CD rom a program which will break into any diebolds MS ACCESS based database and change results then erase all log entries of the intrusion. It's easy to imagine that SQL can nbe attacted too either by security hoiles or user admin mistakes in the table grants.
Sequoia's Glowing reviews in florida, santa clara and Lousianna counties are somewhat marred by the fact that the Luosianna county agent who reviews them highly is now under indictment for a payoff from seqouia, like wise the santa clara and florida registrar have both been (publicly) paid off by the
No natural body of water has wter on the surface. its all coated by oily or other hydrophobic molecules lighter than water. I guess I dont understand what they are proposing to do differently. do their molecules cross link to each other forming an actual blanket that is kinetically impermeable at natural temperatures.
I would think that if water cant get out kinetically then air and nitrogen cant get in. so you can kiss all fish and algea goodbye.
Why are computers still being used for simulating nuclear weapons tests?
Historically, the modern reason for computer simulation of nukes is to put a stopper in the nuclear proliferation genie. The logic is convoluted but sensible. The idea is that first you get a test ban treaty. Second, You offer economic and power production aid to all countries that dont develop nuke engineering or let you control their plutonium bearing nuke waste.
this creates a situation where nuke weapon engineering has to be done either in secret (since there no civial reactor technology to produce plutonium) or if done overtly, they still cant test their weapons. Neither can we.
this leaves everyone in a delightful position of
1) not being perfectly certain their nukes will work when delivered. thus they are not good offensive weapons. (imagine what would happen if pakistan launched on india and it were a dud).
2) yet they still make good defensive weapons since even though its not tested it doesn;t mean it wont work.
which is sort of nice. it discourages both developement and first use. world is MAD but better off.
Unfortunately the US would never go for this if they did not have a way of testing their own weapons. So they do it in silico rather than in nevada. This allows us the political will to go through with this. a better world results.
THe clock is ticking. we know the weapons will work now but they are aging.. will they work in say ten years. THis is where computer simulations come in. within ten years we should be able to model nukes and nuke aging on one of these machines at a level that gaurentees our readiness. or maybe if this test ban thing works we can just scrap them all in ten years.
that was the plan. But now with about 30 countries with potential nuke development capability this plan maybe about to break down. thus we go to plan B.
plan B is we use these big computers to design new reactors that dont produce plutonium. We sell these to the countries. now they can have nuke power without creating weapons grade plutonium. Again every body happy.
Wow 650,000 processors. what's that in equivalent g5 flops, say 4000 or so:-P
kidding aside, are these based on the novel IBM design for having small clusters of wimpy processors sharing sections of memory. The concept being to have each processor running slowly, almost stalled waiting on a memory fetch. (while seeming stupid at first glance, its really diabolically clever since now you can junk all the long pipelines and branch prediction stuff: every single byte that comes from memory will be used by some CPU requesting it, thus you minimize the memmory buss buttle neck that is, ultimately, the limit on most processing).
if this is that design then that 65,000 processors indeed may not be quite as much computing horespower as it sounds. it might indeed be comparable to a smaller handful of G5s.
Windows XP has a similar feature that waits a until the computer is not in use for a certain amount of time. It would make sense that Apple would give users the same option.
I'm Not sure the windows approach is really better. Notice that the apple approach is more minimalist in moving files.
If you aren't actively using a file it wont get moved--that's good since moving a file always entails a tiny but finite risk of corruption.
(notice that the apple method relies on journaling to save your butt if the computer crashes mid write.)
The apple program doesn't even activate unless the file is fragmented more than 8 ways-- again minimalist.
the windows program wont be able to move files that are currently open (I would guess). and of course those are exactly the files you will want to defrag most!
the windows program is probably taking a risk that some baddly written program will suddenly decide to read or write to a cached but now dead file pointer.
apple gets away with this at almost no cost by defragging files it was going to read in anyhow for another reason. thus the read adds no time. For many user applications probably wont be going any other disk reads right after that. (e.g. read in the word doc and start editing it).
Notice that the defragger only activates if the file is fragmented more than 8 ways. thus this mutli-read head issue is already accounted for. if you fragment the file into more extents than you have read heads this would presumably be bad. but perhaps 8 is the optimal number or close to it? its also faster because of the way hfs stores the file table that beyond 8 the lookup time increases.
this should defrag all of the 20M or less files on your hard drive.
it locates every file, opens it and reads every bite then closes it.
This should force the defragger to run on all files under 20M. Not that technically the defragger only activates when the file is broken into more that 8 extent regions. So this does not actually defrag everything.
but its also possible that having the file broken into less extents is harmless. first because the the first 8 extents are the fasttes to access in HFS+ and second its theoretically possible that on a multi-headed disk drive that having the file slightly fragmented might be good. Larger numbers of frags than read head would be bad of course
According to the ARS writeup, this feature is on only when journalling is on. This makes total sense, since journalling prevents an incomplete or unverified write from being used.
Mail.app changed a few behaviours. one of which I liked the old way. it used to be that if an account was unchecked for collecting mail automatically then pressing the "get mail" button did not check this account either. Now it does check the account when you press the button.
Personally I liked that since I cant "see" my external e-mail mailserver from work and I cant see my work mail server from outside. thus I just had my external e-mail server unchecked so It did not try to check it when i pressed "get mail".
anyone know how to change this back to the old way.
These things are NOT NEW. in 1985 I was a Jet Propulsion laboratory. A caltech professor there was using a light modulator to perform convolution matrix a operations to decode synthetic aperature radar data. THe design is identical.
and of course this at instance was not likely to have been the first since this was something that was textbook knowledge at that time--fourier processing of signals could be done optically. his was just a particularly advance version, doing more advanced matrix multiples in 2-D.
Its not like apple just stole the technology (ala windows and stacker). Nor is it a case of some sort of standard being embraced and extended.
It is a lot like a automotive products after market seller finding a something they sell is going to be part of next years stadard in the car: Halogen lights, electonic ignition, automatic oilers, turbo chargers. It your market is the aftermarket you are always going to be vulnerable but that does not mean the major mareter is a bully.
Where it gets illegal is when a major marketer uses their leverage to enter a new market. GM cars requiring GM tires and GM gas. The distinctions are fine sometimes since it requires the definition of what is a distict market. In this case there is no fine distinction. LiteSwitch was only useful on macs and it was not a commodity market.
I like camino, is there any reason to use firebird? What features does it have, not have.
My basic usage is: safari, unless safari dont work right, then I use camino. last resort IE for those evil webpages.
Somehow I think 50 million years to human evolution has both bred people who can convince others to do what they want and people resistant to that appeal that in both cases will be no match for any analytical approach to dissecting human puchasing habits.
The induced current (and emf) should be proportional to the area. if a telegraph ran, say, 50km and had a 1 meter separation between the poles then the area is 5x10^4 square meters. I would imagine that in order to start a fire the current would need to be perhaps 10 amps sustained or 100 amps pulsed. And lets imagine that the impedance was 100 ohms. so the emf was by these wild guesses in the neigborhood of 1000-10,000 volts. that sort of sounds high but lets assume that's an upper bound.
if a modern cell phone had a pair of wires with a 1 cm separation and 10 cm in length then this would be 10^-3 sq meters. or 50 million times smaller area. The induced voltage would thus be something like 50 microvolts. not enough to do any dmage even across a sensitive trasnistor junction. but maybe possibly in a sensitive radio receiver could be jammed.
When I first read of the telegraphs carching fire I thought BullShit. Afterall the telegraphs were all magneticly driven, low impedance devices--there were no small gaps to arc across or high-impedance low-voltage elements to explode. Moreover the usual situation is that a large loop is relatively hard to induce a lot of current in (transformers try to concentrate flux not spread it out, hence they are made as small as the materials allow).
but then I started thinking about it more carefully. If one had a magnetic event from the sun then what hit the earth would be an earth-wide, coherent magnetic pulse. In this case the larger the loop of wire the greater the current induced. And telegraphs had miles and miles of wires with macroscopically separated loops. thus the induced current must have been enormormous, hence the fires at the low impedance inductors at the ends.
On the other hand, the magnetic flux per area might not have been very large. hence modern electronics which are small, and generally have ground or back planes closs to the wires wont receive much induced current.
in other words the telegraphs were the optimal energy absorbers but modern devices should receive much lower energy coupling.
Before a bunch of silly gooses shout they can get the same storagein their generic Linux boxes please lets note that were comparing reliable redundant systems.
the X raid has dual redundant power supplies, redundant fans, dual redundant raid controllers, dual redundant and DEDICATED processors, dual redundant ethernet connection, dual redundant fiber channel outputs. it has separate busses and controllers for each ATI hard disk, and the busses to the disks are high speed. all of the disks are hot swapable self contained pluggin units. and it all sits in 3U. (plus another U for whatever server is receiving the fiber channel). All the software on board is tuned to the task and other than the web admin, the box has no extraneous services.
also the raid is Hardware raid 5,1,0 not software. other than a netapp at 25x the price, there's nothing that comes close.
SCO's market cap is 283 million. these folks just bought about 18% of the company for 50 million, so basically they just paid the going rate for the stock--no cut rate deal here. Considering the stock is probably over valued this seems a bit odd at first glance.
but maybe not. If we assume that SCO wins their suit id guess its worth about 2 billion dollars over a several years, maybe more. 18% of a 2 billion dollars revenue (less virtually nil in expenses) is 260 million, or basically a 5 to one profit in cash dividends. in a few years and more in the future. SO right away if they figure the odds of winning are 1 in five, its a good bet.
of course, SCO already has a book value and owns a number of properties that are worth money, so this lessens the risk too.
finally there is alos the high likely hood of greenmail here. They cash infuse SCO, wait a few beats, the stock goes up as suckers invest, or the next SCO bombshell is parsed by the news media, then you dump some of your stock at a premium over what you paid. And finally you could sell some shorts on this to lower your risk so that you cant lose the full 50 million.
So it really does sound like a good investment if you believe sco will win or be bought out for a mulitple of its market cap.
It will be interesting to see if iTunes "just works" on Windows. I figure it wont. But will work good enough that people will like it. They will go around thinking as windows users do that they must be getting the same experience that Mac users do. That is a Totally wrong impression. And this might actually deter switchers.
Hey folks the grass IS greener on the mac side. Come on over.
Should it be perhaps quid res Latinae (what thing of latin) rather than quid quid latine ? Been a while since I took that language.
On a different topic, Why are they called takionauts? That is, is that what they are called in chinese? are the chinese making up greek words in roman letters?
They must have had a hard time getting the Opteron to beat the G5 since they apparently chose rigged benchmarks.
to begin with the mac had less graphics memory and a less advanced grphics card but still turned in a fine job on quake.
There were no tests of large memory moves, a particular strength of the apple G5.
for example, the photshop tests used files of only 50Mb. That's pretty small of a pro-user.
Now in detail: there are only two tests where the opteron significanly outperforms the G5: Word Document tests and an Adobe Quicktime render, the rest are close enough to call a tie: no one machine is best.
Notice that the "quicktime" tests were not done using apple software but actually adobe premier, and adobe has long ago announced that the apple market is not something they are optimizing Premier for.
Now look at the only benchmark where there is a notable difference: WORD. These are all going to be integer operations, which we acknowledge is going to slightly less fast on a g5 then a x86. These are all going to take place on a platform where the APP and the OS share code. Finally word is not an application likely to be highly optimized for speed, espeically on a mac. Moreover, its not going to be using any dual processing capability.
If you wanted to turn the tables I'd suggest picking say PDF rendering, let the Opteron use adobe's product and let apple use their own.
They also did not do any tests that reveal the fact that g5 dual processing scales well.
Finally if you stripped all the security features out of the mac OS, removed the quartz graphics, and changed it to a bare bones primary color (fisher price) interface rather than aqua, you could probably get a faster machine too. but then you would also have a windows experience too.
I once had a look at the giant Transmeta Cluster at Los Alamos called green destiny.
the most impressive thing about it is how small it is. over 280 blades + disk server in a single rack.
then you realize its sitting in an uncooled ordinary room shared by people. its not putting out hardly any heat the building air cant keep up with. its plugged into a normal building power strip, and its not making much noise.
then you see the benchmarks. this thing runs faster than the equivalent pentium on scientific codes. How is this possible you wonder if its doing this code morphing. the answer is that the transmeta JIT code morph results in code that executes faster on the transmeta than the original pentium code. On scientific code with lots of long tight loops the overhead of the code morph goes away and it runs faster. (the opposite is true for GUI desktop apps where it is constantly jumping around and not spending time in small sections of code.).
finally they show you the uptime. forever. no dead units. (on our other pentium cluster form the same manufacturuere we replace as mauch as blade a day)
these things are way better price performance ratio than pentiums when you factor in the total lack of building infrastructure, and maintainence. low heat keeps them stable.
"At the time of the non-decision Apple really did have to start thinking about where it was going after 68k ran out of steam, but the x86 line in those days didn't look particularly promising as a platform, the 68k still beat the 386 and PowerPC beat the 486 when it came out. "
not to mention that the G5 now beats the penitiums in every area: raw cpu perfromance, vector processing, wide data busses, and hyper transport. Plus its loping along at a mere 2Ghz and a rather small chip area while the x86 technology is sweating bullets (and heat) at 4Ghz trying to keep its pipelines full and branch predictions correct and its massive chip real-estate in sync on the clock signal.
The itanium technology of very long instruction compiling is falling on its predictive race condition petards with two speed rollbacks to date.
The PPC software world has yet to truly exploit those sexy well thoughtout vector ops (altivec) and that insanely fast bus, so there's lots of legs for improvement even without processor speed bumps in the near future. the small chip are will end itslef to muliple uints per die, the future still looks bright.
meanwhile the only real developments in the x86 world is the transition to 64 bit (and maybe when the motherboards start to catch up, to ubiquitous hypertransport). But perhaps its nearing the end of its speed, chip area, coherent vector instruction set life cycle?
Slashdot Mirror
The yarn goes that MS products are not so badly written, that IS II is no worse that apache, that outlook is no worse than XXXX, its just that windows runs on 95% of the worlds computers so its a target and when its infected it gets noticed.
this apache story sort of gives a lie to this. if it runs 80% of the web servers it is the largest target by definition. Of course it does get attacked but you dont hear about this being a viral thing, spreading throught the mono crop.
I guess one can counter this argument by saying that bussinesses that run web servers maintain their patches better thsn the devil spawned endusers. But this doesn't really wash. If bussinesses had to patch as often as Windows users did they would be screaming bloody murder since while it only costs the end user free time, it cost the bussinesses actual operating expesnes.
were talking about passive systems here, not gills which actively transport disolved gasses but keep LIQUID phase water out (not gas phase water).
the system under discussion is a two-molecule layer. h20 and o2 and c02 gas molecules are all about the same size. The h20 molecules are present in concentration thousands of times hire than the air. it would take an ubnelievable amount of discrimination to keep water in but let air through.
The HAV act (help amerca vote), created a land rush by mandating a minumum number of touchscreen voting machines by 2004. The stalking horse provision in the bill is that blind people cant use most voting systems without assistance, and people in wheel chairs have difficulties as well. Noble motivation yes, but the cure is worse than the problem.
This land rush was led by diebold with a first-to-market system. they acheived this by using off the shelf components and OS and DB. THe system has not proven reliable or safe. I wont regurgitaete the accusationsof fraud, except to mention that any time elections differ by 6 sigma from poll results someting reeks. Unfortunatley other companies ESS and Sequoia tried to keep pace. the ESS systems at least have the benefit of actually failing to boot so often that florida has abandoned them! THe Sequoia system is the best of the lot but still has its own flaw. At least the sequoia people, when pushed, seem to be trying to respond to the demand for voter verified balloting.
The good news is that After pressure by california's santa clara county (19 million dollar
contract), Sequoia voting system has agrees to implement (at no cost) a
voter verified, recountable, paper ballot in addition to the touch
screen systems.
(see here )
Already the House of representatives has a bill pending ( The Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003) that will require
all touch screen voting systems to be voter verifiable.
(see here )
Indeed the entire country of brazil, which has 400,000 electronic
voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable
systems.
(see here )
A 95 page caltech and MIT study surveying many years of voting reports
that among all voting methods, the method with the single largest
average error rate is electronic voting, which is senate and
gubenatorial elections has almost TWICE the error rate of optical scan voting. This means that by enfranchising blind people we disenfranchise far more people. a bad trade.
(see here page 21 )
Indeed reality is much worse since that's just an average, since
electronic voting errors tend to be both non-random and clustered in
catastrophic events.
For example, Bernalio county in Albuquerque reported 48,000 voters went to the polls
but only 36,000 votes were registered on Sequoia voting systems.
(see here )
Similarly, many votes were lost in the latest election in florida
counties using Sequoia voting systems. Janet reno is investigating
cases where heavily democratic counties registered ZERO votes for any
democrat. Sequoia systems has presented Los Alamos FALSE information
of Seqouia systems. For example, they claimed it did not run on
windows OS. In fact WinEDS their database collection system is based
upon microsoft OS, and uses a Microsoft-based SQL DB, and the password for
this system is "password" (really!).
(see here )
You can in fact obtain this very minute on CD rom a program which will
break into any diebolds MS ACCESS based database and change results then erase all log
entries of the intrusion. It's easy to imagine that SQL can nbe attacted too either by security hoiles or user admin mistakes in the table grants.
Sequoia's Glowing reviews in florida, santa
clara and Lousianna counties are somewhat marred by the fact that the
Luosianna county agent who reviews them highly is now under indictment
for a payoff from seqouia, like wise the santa clara and florida
registrar have both been (publicly) paid off by the
I would think that if water cant get out kinetically then air and nitrogen cant get in. so you can kiss all fish and algea goodbye.
Historically, the modern reason for computer simulation of nukes is to put a stopper in the nuclear proliferation genie. The logic is convoluted but sensible. The idea is that first you get a test ban treaty. Second, You offer economic and power production aid to all countries that dont develop nuke engineering or let you control their plutonium bearing nuke waste.
this creates a situation where nuke weapon engineering has to be done either in secret (since there no civial reactor technology to produce plutonium) or if done overtly, they still cant test their weapons. Neither can we.
this leaves everyone in a delightful position of 1) not being perfectly certain their nukes will work when delivered. thus they are not good offensive weapons. (imagine what would happen if pakistan launched on india and it were a dud).
2) yet they still make good defensive weapons since even though its not tested it doesn;t mean it wont work.
which is sort of nice. it discourages both developement and first use. world is MAD but better off.
Unfortunately the US would never go for this if they did not have a way of testing their own weapons. So they do it in silico rather than in nevada. This allows us the political will to go through with this. a better world results. THe clock is ticking. we know the weapons will work now but they are aging.. will they work in say ten years. THis is where computer simulations come in. within ten years we should be able to model nukes and nuke aging on one of these machines at a level that gaurentees our readiness. or maybe if this test ban thing works we can just scrap them all in ten years.
that was the plan. But now with about 30 countries with potential nuke development capability this plan maybe about to break down. thus we go to plan B.
plan B is we use these big computers to design new reactors that dont produce plutonium. We sell these to the countries. now they can have nuke power without creating weapons grade plutonium. Again every body happy.
except of course N. Korea.
kidding aside, are these based on the novel IBM design for having small clusters of wimpy processors sharing sections of memory. The concept being to have each processor running slowly, almost stalled waiting on a memory fetch. (while seeming stupid at first glance, its really diabolically clever since now you can junk all the long pipelines and branch prediction stuff: every single byte that comes from memory will be used by some CPU requesting it, thus you minimize the memmory buss buttle neck that is, ultimately, the limit on most processing).
if this is that design then that 65,000 processors indeed may not be quite as much computing horespower as it sounds. it might indeed be comparable to a smaller handful of G5s.
or maybe i'm full of crap.
I'm Not sure the windows approach is really better. Notice that the apple approach is more minimalist in moving files.
Notice that the defragger only activates if the file is fragmented more than 8 ways. thus this mutli-read head issue is already accounted for. if you fragment the file into more extents than you have read heads this would presumably be bad. but perhaps 8 is the optimal number or close to it? its also faster because of the way hfs stores the file table that beyond 8 the lookup time increases.
this should defrag all of the 20M or less files on your hard drive.
it locates every file, opens it and reads every bite then closes it.
This should force the defragger to run on all files under 20M. Not that technically the defragger only activates when the file is broken into more that 8 extent regions. So this does not actually defrag everything.
but its also possible that having the file broken into less extents is harmless. first because the the first 8 extents are the fasttes to access in HFS+ and second its theoretically possible that on a multi-headed disk drive that having the file slightly fragmented might be good. Larger numbers of frags than read head would be bad of course
According to the ARS writeup, this feature is on only when journalling is on. This makes total sense, since journalling prevents an incomplete or unverified write from being used.
Mail.app changed a few behaviours. one of which I liked the old way. it used to be that if an account was unchecked for collecting mail automatically then pressing the "get mail" button did not check this account either. Now it does check the account when you press the button. Personally I liked that since I cant "see" my external e-mail mailserver from work and I cant see my work mail server from outside. thus I just had my external e-mail server unchecked so It did not try to check it when i pressed "get mail". anyone know how to change this back to the old way.
and of course this at instance was not likely to have been the first since this was something that was textbook knowledge at that time--fourier processing of signals could be done optically. his was just a particularly advance version, doing more advanced matrix multiples in 2-D.
It is a lot like a automotive products after market seller finding a something they sell is going to be part of next years stadard in the car: Halogen lights, electonic ignition, automatic oilers, turbo chargers. It your market is the aftermarket you are always going to be vulnerable but that does not mean the major mareter is a bully.
Where it gets illegal is when a major marketer uses their leverage to enter a new market. GM cars requiring GM tires and GM gas. The distinctions are fine sometimes since it requires the definition of what is a distict market. In this case there is no fine distinction. LiteSwitch was only useful on macs and it was not a commodity market.
I like camino, is there any reason to use firebird? What features does it have, not have. My basic usage is: safari, unless safari dont work right, then I use camino. last resort IE for those evil webpages.
Somehow I think 50 million years to human evolution has both bred people who can convince others to do what they want and people resistant to that appeal that in both cases will be no match for any analytical approach to dissecting human puchasing habits.
if a modern cell phone had a pair of wires with a 1 cm separation and 10 cm in length then this would be 10^-3 sq meters. or 50 million times smaller area. The induced voltage would thus be something like 50 microvolts. not enough to do any dmage even across a sensitive trasnistor junction. but maybe possibly in a sensitive radio receiver could be jammed.
but then I started thinking about it more carefully. If one had a magnetic event from the sun then what hit the earth would be an earth-wide, coherent magnetic pulse. In this case the larger the loop of wire the greater the current induced. And telegraphs had miles and miles of wires with macroscopically separated loops. thus the induced current must have been enormormous, hence the fires at the low impedance inductors at the ends.
On the other hand, the magnetic flux per area might not have been very large. hence modern electronics which are small, and generally have ground or back planes closs to the wires wont receive much induced current.
in other words the telegraphs were the optimal energy absorbers but modern devices should receive much lower energy coupling.
the X raid has dual redundant power supplies, redundant fans, dual redundant raid controllers, dual redundant and DEDICATED processors, dual redundant ethernet connection, dual redundant fiber channel outputs. it has separate busses and controllers for each ATI hard disk, and the busses to the disks are high speed. all of the disks are hot swapable self contained pluggin units. and it all sits in 3U. (plus another U for whatever server is receiving the fiber channel). All the software on board is tuned to the task and other than the web admin, the box has no extraneous services.
also the raid is Hardware raid 5,1,0 not software. other than a netapp at 25x the price, there's nothing that comes close.
Mac OSX server is based on Free Bsd5
other web services running out of the box
Apache 1.3 and 2.0
Tomcat 4.1 and Axis 1.1
JBoss 3.2
MySQL 4
JBoss Deployment Tools
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Ldap, samba
but maybe not. If we assume that SCO wins their suit id guess its worth about 2 billion dollars over a several years, maybe more. 18% of a 2 billion dollars revenue (less virtually nil in expenses) is 260 million, or basically a 5 to one profit in cash dividends. in a few years and more in the future. SO right away if they figure the odds of winning are 1 in five, its a good bet.
of course, SCO already has a book value and owns a number of properties that are worth money, so this lessens the risk too.
finally there is alos the high likely hood of greenmail here. They cash infuse SCO, wait a few beats, the stock goes up as suckers invest, or the next SCO bombshell is parsed by the news media, then you dump some of your stock at a premium over what you paid. And finally you could sell some shorts on this to lower your risk so that you cant lose the full 50 million.
So it really does sound like a good investment if you believe sco will win or be bought out for a mulitple of its market cap.
It will be interesting to see if iTunes "just works" on Windows. I figure it wont. But will work good enough that people will like it. They will go around thinking as windows users do that they must be getting the same experience that Mac users do. That is a Totally wrong impression. And this might actually deter switchers.
Hey folks the grass IS greener on the mac side. Come on over.
Should it be perhaps
quid res Latinae
(what thing of latin)
rather than
quid quid latine ?
Been a while since I took that language.
On a different topic, Why are they called takionauts? That is, is that what they are called in chinese? are the chinese making up greek words in roman letters?
They must have had a hard time getting the Opteron to beat the G5 since they apparently chose rigged benchmarks.
to begin with the mac had less graphics memory and a less advanced grphics card but still turned in a fine job on quake.
There were no tests of large memory moves, a particular strength of the apple G5.
for example, the photshop tests used files of only 50Mb. That's pretty small of a pro-user.
Now in detail: there are only two tests where the opteron significanly outperforms the G5: Word Document tests and an Adobe Quicktime render, the rest are close enough to call a tie: no one machine is best.
Notice that the "quicktime" tests were not done using apple software but actually adobe premier, and adobe has long ago announced that the apple market is not something they are optimizing Premier for.
Now look at the only benchmark where there is a notable difference: WORD. These are all going to be integer operations, which we acknowledge is going to slightly less fast on a g5 then a x86. These are all going to take place on a platform where the APP and the OS share code. Finally word is not an application likely to be highly optimized for speed, espeically on a mac. Moreover, its not going to be using any dual processing capability.
If you wanted to turn the tables I'd suggest picking say PDF rendering, let the Opteron use adobe's product and let apple use their own.
They also did not do any tests that reveal the fact that g5 dual processing scales well.
Finally if you stripped all the security features out of the mac OS, removed the quartz graphics, and changed it to a bare bones primary color (fisher price) interface rather than aqua, you could probably get a faster machine too. but then you would also have a windows experience too.
I once had a look at the giant Transmeta Cluster at Los Alamos called green destiny.
the most impressive thing about it is how small it is.
over 280 blades + disk server in a single rack.
then you realize its sitting in an uncooled ordinary room shared by people. its not putting out hardly any heat the building air cant keep up with. its plugged into a normal building power strip, and its not making much noise.
then you see the benchmarks. this thing runs faster than the equivalent pentium on scientific codes. How is this possible you wonder if its doing this code morphing. the answer is that the transmeta JIT code morph results in code that executes faster on the transmeta than the original pentium code. On scientific code with lots of long tight loops the overhead of the code morph goes away and it runs faster. (the opposite is true for GUI desktop apps where it is constantly jumping around and not spending time in small sections of code.).
finally they show you the uptime. forever. no dead units. (on our other pentium cluster form the same manufacturuere we replace as mauch as blade a day)
these things are way better price performance ratio than pentiums when you factor in the total lack of building infrastructure, and maintainence. low heat keeps them stable.
not to mention that the G5 now beats the penitiums in every area: raw cpu perfromance, vector processing, wide data busses, and hyper transport. Plus its loping along at a mere 2Ghz and a rather small chip area while the x86 technology is sweating bullets (and heat) at 4Ghz trying to keep its pipelines full and branch predictions correct and its massive chip real-estate in sync on the clock signal.
The itanium technology of very long instruction compiling is falling on its predictive race condition petards with two speed rollbacks to date.
The PPC software world has yet to truly exploit those sexy well thoughtout vector ops (altivec) and that insanely fast bus, so there's lots of legs for improvement even without processor speed bumps in the near future. the small chip are will end itslef to muliple uints per die, the future still looks bright.
meanwhile the only real developments in the x86 world is the transition to 64 bit (and maybe when the motherboards start to catch up, to ubiquitous hypertransport). But perhaps its nearing the end of its speed, chip area, coherent vector instruction set life cycle?